THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER11, 2021 59
profound of these is the one a child
would ask: Why are the ghosts still
here with us?
I
f you want to find birds in 2081, you
need to befriend the mechanical ones.
Humming Jets are the slender, solar-
powered daughters of the helicopters I
grew up with. Stu took us over the Cas-
cades. He can turn all the water in his
body into red wine and still fly straight—
it’s his Bible magic.
“Nobody lives down there anymore,
right, Dad?” Starling asked reluctantly,
when we were about an hour away from
the collapsed bridges that bracket the
still-burning fires around the ruins of
what was once Portland. I wondered
what she was seeing with her inner eye.
I’m sure they show the kids holo-reels
of the Great Western Fires, no doubt
heavily edited.
“Nobody is alive in that city,” I
confirmed.
She nodded, doing her best impres-
sion of the blank mountains below us.
Maybe she’d decided to feel her grief
and horror when she returned home.
Starling, like me, is a master procrasti-
nator. I can put off feeling things for
years at a time. She looks like me, too,
with that face like a blasting cap. When
we do erupt, watch out. Yesenia told me
as I was packing my things that she’d
had an epiphany: “I used to think that
you were crazy about me, Jasper. But
now I understand that I made a gram-
matical error. I am not the object here.
When I delete myself from the sentence,
guess what? You’re just crazy.”
When Yesenia suggested that I look
for a new place to sleep, I felt an avian
calm come over me. I used old coördi-
nates to navigate through the blinding
storm.
“Do you remember,” I asked her,
“when I opened the bedroom window
in our first apartment, in subzero tem-
peratures, to let in the ghost of a female
nightingale?” It was one of our touch-
stone memories. Her gasp of joy had
been as beautiful as the night song.
“I was always pretending,” she said.
“But you make it so we have to pre-
tend. You’re like a little boy that way,
Jasper. I’d rather smash my own thumb
with a hammer than see the face you
make when I tell you I don’t see the
ghost birds in the eaves of the St. Fran-
cis cathedral.” I’d never heard a sadder
laugh in my life. “Not one dead pigeon,
Jasper.”
On one of our last nights together,
Yesenia and I had it out; she refused to
let me take Starling to hear the ghost
of a hermit thrush which had been sing-
ing late into the evening in the sunken
multiplex.
“She is happier than you and I will
ever be in this world we made, and you
resent her for it! Jasper, what kind of fa-
ther wants to turn his daughter’s body
into a haunted house?”
“
Y
our bird-watching crew is totally
unhinged,” Starling once told me
approvingly.
Her mother said a version of the same
thing in a different key.
Two weeks after the Surveillers re-
leased Suzy, she killed herself. All the
hundreds of readings she’d taken, and
risked her life to smuggle home from
the cloud forest, had come back bone-
white. Nobody knew if there had been
a problem with the exposure or if the
Trogonidae family of birds was leaving
us for a second time.
One song had survived—Suzy’s re-
cording of a violaceous trogon. Twelve
down-slurred notes, repeated with a
plaintive intensity. An ancient song forged
in Eocene sunlight.
I played the ghost-audio recording
for Starling and her mom. Both listened
patiently for the first twenty-two min-
utes, and then Yesenia stood up and pan-
tomimed a scream.
“Jasper,” she said. We would be sep-
arated in three months, although I did
not know it at the time. “To me, this
sounds like a horny Chihuahua.”
“I like it,” Starling said from the sofa.
She tends to side with whichever of her
parents seems the most downtrodden on
that particular day. Even knowing this,
I felt my heart lift.
“I knew you would, honey,” I said,
beaming at her.
“What did you like about it?” her
mother said. “To me it sounded like, cow-
cow-cow.”
Starling looked from Yesenia to me,
and I was struck once more by the ma-
ture sadness in her dark, enormous eyes.
“I like watching Dad’s face while he
listens.”
T
o be safe, I’d had Stu take us in three
hours before sunset. We had seen
the domed compounds of some of the
wealthiest people alive, glinting on the
bald slopes of the eastern Cascades,
“Those with the largest litter box have the worst technique.”
• •
